I’m very grateful to Anne Sinclair for suggesting this topic for a video. I think it’s very useful for business English students and I’ve just written a guest blog post about it over at the Gallery Languages website that you can read here. Hope you like it!
As always, it’s available on our Simple English Videos website, and also on our YouTube channel.
‘Lie’ and ‘lay’ are so confusing that native speakers sometimes muddle them up. When Bob Dylan sang ‘Lay lady lay’ he should probably have been singing, ‘Lie lady lie’ – it doesn’t sound as good though.
We’ve made a video lesson about the two verbs. Please share it if you think you know some people who would find it handy.
As always, it’s available on our Simple English Videos website, and also on our YouTube channel.
There’s a hand gesture I find myself making when I’m teaching. It goes like this…
I hope it’s not rude in Italian or any other languages, but I find it jolly handy for showing students when I want them to switch the word order around. Now, of course, it doesn’t work too well as a still image. If you could see me actually moving my hands around it’d be much clearer.
And it’s the same with whiteboard text. I can draw lines and arrows, but without moving type, I can’t actually show my students how words need to be moved around. But video changes that. It’s a cool feature of video – you can animate text.
I made an earlier version of this video a while back and we’ve just upgraded the text animations, audio, lighting and we’ve added a couple of gags. Don’t get too excited. This is not a laugh-a-minute-video, but I think it’s full of solid learning matter. See what you think.
It’s also available at our Simple English Videos website with a clickable transcript. Hope you like it!
Teach them the difference between cook and cooker!
Also available on our award winning Simple English Videos website with a clickable transcript.
…and also how to use the structure ‘have something done’. Our latest video…
As always, it’s available with a clickable transcript at Simple English Videos. Enjoy…
One of the many things I love about video is the way it allows us to animate text and diagrams. Being able to show a dynamic image often makes things clearer.
Here’s our latest video on the prepositions ‘by’ and ‘until’. I’m very fond of this one for two reasons . Firstly, I could animate the time line diagrams. Second, Zehra and Zeynep kindly reprised their boss and manager roles. They’re so good! Enjoy!
As always, this video is available with a clickable transcript at Simple English Videos.
If you’d like to see Zehra playing our unrelenting boss in another video – check out this one about ‘on time’ and ‘in time’. It received some great comments so we made a follow up that’s here.
If you teach any business English students, you’ll know that language we use to talk about time, schedules, and deadlines is jolly useful. With that in mind, we decided to take a systematic approach to teaching the verbs ‘take’ and ‘last’. We made three videos.
Here’s the first one and it’s about the verb ‘take’:
Here’s the second one and it’s about the verb ‘last’:
The third one compares the two verbs and has one of my favourite gags – watch out for Jay playing my dentist!
Fortunately, learning the difference between ‘take’ and ‘last’ is a lot quicker than a tooth extraction. As always the videos are available with clickable transcripts over at Simple English Videos Dot Com.
Enjoy!
Do your students sometimes get confused about the past tense of feel? And do they sometimes say fall down when they mean fall?
Here’s a video to help them get it right.
As always, it’s available over at Simple English Videos dot com with a clickable transcript.
If so, perhaps our latest video on the verb ‘concentrate’ will help.
As always, you can find it with a clickable transcript at Simple English Videos Dot Com
There’s some stuff that comes up all the time in class. For example, how many times have you found yourself having to teach the key rules we follow when we use ‘make and do’? I bet it’s a lot. And then there’s other stuff that comes up less frequently. And when you try to pull a good explanation from your memory, you think, ‘Dammit, what are all those examples that illustrate it clearly?’.
‘During’ is one that’s sometimes caught me out. It really helps if you can give lots of examples of nouns/noun phrases that we use with ‘during’, but can you think of them off the top of your head? And will your students be able to remember them if you do?
This is a short video, only a little over 2 minutes. But we’ve packed it full of what we think are good collocations with ‘during’ and ‘for’ and we’ve tried to make them fun and memorable.
As always, it’s available over at ‘Simple English Videos Dot Com’ with a clickable transcript. Enjoy!
